It’s been a few weeks since the last post, – not an indication of little happening, but more a case of a flood of activity that’s been hard to sit down and organize and share.
Certainly the photo streams that I post on Flickr have been updated regularly:

For the design class here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/121697751@N02/sets/72157646692621755/
For the MPX stem class here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/121697751@N02/sets/72157646271766017/

It’s late on a Friday already, but it’s worth sending out a few ideas about what we’ve been working on – things have been exciting and reaching some interesting points in our work.

One of the things that is clear is that in both of the classes that I’ve been working with, the need for structure around the things we’re learning is clear and fits well within our understanding of how we learn science around us – if we can develop effective, simple and applicable models of the way things behave, then it makes them easier to apply an understanding novel situations.

STEM

The big activity we have been working towards has been building electric bikes – not a ready-made kit with easy to attach parts, but the nitty-gritty and get your fingernails dirty kind of building that involves identifying parts that put together would allow a cheap, effective and creative way to provide urban transportation. In order to get to this, a fundamental understanding of electricity and magnetism are necessary so that when we are connecting these industrial grade parts we have an appreciation of things like voltage, current limits, parallel and series and their role, why wires have different gauges… Etc.

In order to set the foundational knowledge for this, we needed to have a good working model for understanding electricity. Back in my modeling experiences from the 1990s, I was introduced to CASTLE (Capacitor-Aided System for Teaching and Learning Electricity) approach to learning electricity which was developed by Melvin Steinberg of Smith College and uses a compressible fluid approach to understanding how charge flows in circuits ( a brief description of the curriculum and its rationale here:http://www.pasco.com/prodCatalog/EM/EM-8624_castle-kit/ ). I really believe in this kind of structured but constructivist approach to building an understanding of circuits, charge flow, and a functional understanding of what’s going on with electrical devices, so we’ve been using this to build our foundational knowledge as we have been unpacking our kits.

This week we reach the culminating point where the students started hooking up the parts of their electric bike kit and needed to learn everything from the correct schematics to hook it up, to stripping wire and crimping connectors to make things fit together correctly – a lot of this was new to me working with the scale of items and it was both exciting and challenging to make sure the students were able to work on these ideas. By the end of class today, Friday, two of the five groups had connected the parts together and successfully got their motors working through the controller and the throttle – success! There are more pictures of the Flickr site, but here’s a few pictures below. Next week, we get to the really challenging work – how to put these parts on a bicycle so that it is powered and can be used to transport students across our campus.

Students working with their electric motor kits

click here for a movie of a groups working motor

Another group grapples with putting together their components

All students were required to create a schematic diagram that showed the correct connections between the components for their electric bike

Defense of understanding of circuits and charge

Students defending their understanding of the circuits and charge flow

Innovative Design Technology

We finished the first large project and shared designs a few weeks ago, and so we wanted to give the students a few smaller challenges to give a little more variety to the design work that they have been developing. As a result, we chose a roundtable activity where we let them determine categories where design might be interesting and applicable to address real-world problems. Eight different teams ended up choosing problems with either steering wheel redesign for cars, or looking at recycling as a opportunity to think about how design could improve people’s behaviors in the process. I have attached a couple of the slide presentations in PDF format, and one of the challenges continues to be to make sure that there is good science rigor underneath the work that they are doing – in the case of their work in this round, students investigated thermodynamics, heat transfer of different materials, ergonomics as they looked out the ways in position that people hold wheels, the different kinds of plastics that exist and the ways they are recycled, and how temperature can be measured by a variety of means.

As we use our design thinking to approach problems, it becomes a really useful framework for learners to consider both what they know, how to identify a problem that needs to be solved, and a process to get to the end. We have actually looked at a couple of different models for design process – including this week how the Wright brothers attacked building the first airplane, and how engineers approach building design. The design framework becomes a means to look at problems, to think about what we know it but we don’t know, and how to quickly generate possible solutions and test them. Some pictures below as well as the presentations from this last round of work:

PDF Presentation sam audreen erika

Steering Wheel Keynote_Koa, Marshall, Sam

Prototype creation

Scaling ideasFrom computer-generated models to working size

Construction with cardboard for the prototypes

Opening slide from another group talking about their chair process

Students defend their chair design to the class

So much to talk about, and so I’ll try to blog more frequently over the next few weeks as we reach some culminating points in our work…

Well, here we are eight weeks into the semester. What are we up to these days? And for that matter, what’s on my mind about our work?

Let’s start with interacting with text for meaning. We often in education asked students to read text to acquire new terms and concepts, to expose students to different opinions and to consider different perspectives and approaches. This week in the design class the students were reading some different articles on the importance of ergonomics as they go through the process of designing, prototyping and testing their chair designs.
As I was looking through their notes, there was a wide gap between some students and others. As I was thinking about the role that these notes played, I realized I was having the students take the notes to deepen their understanding of the field, but I wasn’t really having them interact with their own thinking enough. Below are a couple of pictures of work I considered exemplary because they show students not just taking down ideas, but organizing, reflecting and sketching to try and deepen their meaning.

Matt’s Sketches on good ergonomics

notice Samantha’s interaction with her own text

some of samantha’s notes

notice how matt organizes through color and offsetting text

There are certainly many ways to go from this initial data mining activity to more meaning. I realized I wasn’t doing enough to have them consider their own work, so I asked them to go back through their notes and highlight three important concepts and two areas where they felt that they didn’t really understand the ideas fully and annotate those in a way so that we could talk about what they learned and what they still have questions about. I also debated whether having them do a think pair share activity would be helpful so they could talk about that – I plan to have them do that when they come back together with me next class period. All of this is tied to working towards creating a more reflective process in their learning. Their blogs are another element in doing this.

As a part of the design class we have been working on re-designing the student chair experience. They have created designs in sketch up make:

They have been working on printing these in our 3-D printers, which added another layer of technology to this project. The last step is to create a full scale prototype out of cardboard. I realize that most of them have not made a full model out of cardboard before so to get them warmed up, we had them research ways to work with cardboard and then pick a small-scale project to build from the following website: http://www.ikatbag.com/2011/03/how-to-work-with-cardboard.html

Today they showcased their constructions which took about an hour and a half of class time:

mini top hat

hinged gift box

sabers and swords

top hat design – love the aesthetics

mini top hat

dragon boat

alien space ship (the inside was detailed as well)

top hat with examples of ways to adhere edges

so for them, the next step now is to build the chair out of cardboard – more to come on that activity…

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The 10th grade MPX students have still been exploring issues around transportation, but we’ve also been trying to understanding the kinematic equations of motion which are part of our physics content as well as a deeper conversation about motion in transportation. One of these sidebar projects I’ve had them working on is building a catapult by first converting the design into orthographic representations, building a one quarter scale model out of chopsticks with the ultimate goal of building the catapults, which we will start tomorrow. There’s many layers to this particular activity – working with the mathematics of scaling, attention to detail around design and construction, understanding how we move from concept to design to construction and central to the core content, the physics of projectiles… The pictures below show the scale models that the students completed which took a couple of hours of class time between creating the schematics which I showed in my last blog, and the final products you see below:

careful measurements

finishing touches

attention to detail

competed 1/4 catapult scale models

construction of scale models

Hopefully by the next time I create a blog post, we’ll see examples of their final product work. Tomorrow we pull out the power tools and let them have at the full construction! Speaking of which, our ninth graders just started working on their first construction which is building tables that they will be using to do their full scale aquaponics constructions on during the course of the year:

engineering: from design to construction

mpx 9 construction team

working in our make-shift lanai shop

When we say we believe in constructivism, we really get our hands dirty!